by Ian Watson
Much gentler laughter this time, and a smattering of polite applause as people, recalling the origin of this name in the Japanese creation myth, looked over their shoulders at Keiko and Andrik.
“Onokoro,” strictly, but the tongues of the expedition hadn’t quite fitted round the hardness of the syllable, so it had been softened by general consent. This was the name for the first “naturally coagulated’’ island—as it translated out—which was stirred in the primal waters by the demiurges Izanami and Izanagi as they stood on the Ama no Hasidate, Heaven’s Bridge. For the first time Keiko shuddered at the name she had favoured. Had the Kybers coagulated naturally out of primal protoplasm? What lance had stirred them? Whose hand had held it?
“Some of you, I understand, do not happily anticipate renewed confinement aboard the Heavenbridge for the duration of such a mission.”
“He’s read my mind,” whispered Andrik sidelong.
“Mine, too,” Keiko acknowledged. “Shhhh.”
“In which case Dr Olivant and I may have a somewhat ambivalent kind of happy news for you.” Captain Hsi stepped aside for the astrophysicist. “Dr Olivant, please.”
Craig’s long blond hair hung loose today. When he grasped the edges of the wobbly lectern, the stand slipped away from him. After catching and setting it right, Craig put his hands behind his back and pointed his chin toward his audience in a touchingly vulnerable way. He looked like a young Father Christmas, beardless and ruddy.
“The ambivalent happy news that Captain Hsi is talking about is just this,” Craig said. “Dextro is showing warning signs of going nova. Since shortly after our research/reconnaissance team settled in on the Platform, Dr Mahindra and I have been working on this problem, and we’re reasonably certain of our conclusions.”
V. K. Mahindra, Keiko knew, was Craig’s counterpart aboard the light-skimmer. Both the Platform and the ship were equipped with a full range of spectroscopic and heat measuring equipment, not to mention telescopes of the radio as well as the visible-light variety. Further, the Heavenbridge had dispatched a small remote probe toward Dextro and another toward Laevo within days of their arrival in the Gemini system.
No one moved, no one laughed, and Keiko could not discover even an ambivalent form of “happiness” in Craig’s news.
“How soon?” asked Nikolai Taras, the atmospheric specialist.
“That’s hard to tell,” Craig replied. “No one has ever perched smack dab on top of a potential nova before, waiting for it to hatch.”
“Give us an estimate,” said Naomi Davis from the front row.
“Maybe six standard months from now, Naomi. Maybe five years. I suppose I should emphasize that we’re in no immediate danger ourselves, provided we don’t wait to see this glorious sunbird all the way out of the egg. Mahindra believes that we’ll have at least two E-months’ warning, no matter when it happens. That’s ample time to take flight.”
“What this means,” put in Captain Hsi, “is that we may be going home much sooner than any of us expected.”
“What’s likely to be the impact on Earth, our own solar system?” asked Naomi, shifting in her chair.
“Minimal,” Craig said. “We’re thirty-seven light-years from home, and we’re talking about a nova, a fairly commonplace event in binary systems, and not the life-annihilating bombardment of cosmic rays that would issue from a nearby supernova. Thirty-seven years from now, no one on your Clapham omnibus is even particularly likely to notice.”
“Small consolation to the Kybers,” Andrik said.
“That’s probably right. Even if Onogoro does decouple from Dextro, it’s still going to be fried—somewhere out around Laevo, if it manages to complete the switchover before Dextro goes nova.”
Keiko, shocked, spoke up: “Is there no chance that the planet might survive?”
Craig shook his head, then considered for a moment. “Slim and none, I’d say. The slim is so improbable that to mention it is to give it more notice than it deserves.”
“Nevertheless,” Keiko urged him.
“All right. If Dextro blazes up precisely when Laevo eclipses its newly recaptured planet, and for a short enough time, maybe—just maybe—such a conjunction would protect the Kybers and all their lower-life-form buddies from the main force of the heatwave. And maybe it wouldn’t, Kei. Yes or no, there’d still be a whole helluva bunch of charged particles flying around. Even if you could guarantee an eclipse at Fire Time, with Dextro completely occluded from the inhabitants of this world, you couldn’t get me out on the surface in a deck chair.”
“Maybe the Kybers and the Onogorovan biota could survive,” Clemencia Venáges suggested. “Maybe they evolved their shells and carapaces and armour for just this sort of situation. I mean, there’s a strong body of opinion to the effect that novas fire off every now and then alternately in binaries—because, you know, of gradual matter exchange. So Dextro burns off its excess, and calms down; Laevo builds up its own excess from Dextro’s droppings—and eventually it flares too. And so on. Maybe evolution could—”
Craig Olivant grasped the music stand and stared in mute embarrassment at the floor.
Naomi Davis, looking over her shoulder, spoke directly to the young planetologist: “That isn’t something that evolution’s likely to take into account. You don’t get much chance to recover from the first experience! And it could be millions of years before the repeat performance. No, I’d venture that the shells and whatnot are simply adaptations to the periodic hourglass orbit around the two suns.”
“And now their sands are running out,” Betti Songa said.
Andrik breathed out wearily. “We’ll have to tell the Kybers.”
“When it’s impossible to get through to them?” Betti asked. “When, even if we could, there’s nothing we can do to help? What’s the point in telling them they’re condemned .. to fry?”
“Maybe they already know,” Keiko said. She saw again the statues of Kannon in Sanjusangendo and recalled Andrik’s fanciful remark about housing the Kybers in such a temple. Was it impossible?
Heinrich Eshleman, the chemist, said, “They put up with death rather well, don’t they? Rather neatly. Aren’t they already ‘dead’ a great deal of the time?”
“Shut up, Heinrich,” Naomi told him.
“We could save a few of them,” Andrik said. “If we ferried them up to orbit while they’re in kybertrance, what’s to prevent us from stacking them like cargo in one of the freight modules?”
“I am,” replied Captain Hsi. “We don’t have room for that sort of madness, Dr Norn, and the ethics of it are questionable.”
“Whereas the ethics of permitting them all to perish—”
“Hush,” Keiko murmured, touching Andrik’s hand.
“We could easily save several alien families that way, sir. Maybe as many as a hundred individuals.”
Captain Hsi took the music stand away from Craig. “These possibilities can be dealt with later. In the meantime, to placate your burgeoning sense of responsibility, Dr Norn, I instruct you to discuss with the Kybers this matter of their sun going nova. Do it today if you like.”
“If today is anything like yesterday, sir, or the day before, or the day before that, the Kybers aren’t talking.”
“Then perhaps you need some help.”
“What sort? I’ve tried everything I know.”
“Take Dr Takahashi with you. That’s a logical step, is it not? If a cyberneticist and a xenologist have no success breaking this annoying impasse, then let a linguist try—especially the linguist who taught one of their number human speech.”
“Speech is useless at the graveside,” Eshleman remarked wryly, “if you’re trying to establish contact with the corpse.”
“I would be happy to try,” Keiko said. She noted the perplexity in Andrik’s gaze as he calculated the odds of her being a genuine help.
“Fine,” said Captain Hsi. “In the time remaining to us before our withdrawal, however long from now that may be
, I intend to …” He began outlining a complex new assignments-schedule, the terms of which altered whimsically with various arcane astrophysical contingencies. Although Keiko struggled to follow the gist of the captain’s remarks, her thoughts were already elsewhere. …
SEVEN
As Andrik of course knew they would, they drew Sixkiller as their floater pilot.
Leaving Betti to other tasks in the research complex, they lifted off from the Platform in the floater—a triangular-shaped craft with a semicircular wing and a set of retractable landing legs—in mid-afternoon. The sun, which Keiko could not help viewing with a certain fearful scepticism, hung in the thin Onogorovan atmosphere like a hole burning outward in a piece of violet tissue paper.
The Kyber dwelling nearest the Platform, which had purposely been built above an upland rock face at a remove from the alien palaces, was a good five kilometres distant. The palace of the Kyber whom Andrik and Betti had brought back with them for language lessons lay another kilometre or so beyond that one. Although a team might have easily walked to the nearest inhabited craters, Captain Hsi permitted no one to venture on foot more than a few dozen metres from the base of the Platform.
Floaters were safer. They were equipped with radios, food, bedding, medicine, and research aids. Moreover, the terrain—where fogs drifted like calving icebergs; where plants sometimes resembled boulders, and boulders plants—made hiking perilous. Crater-probing was an enterprise only for the trained or the sure-of-foot. That was why Sixkiller, in addition to his piloting skills, had earned a place on the Onogoro Expedition, and why Andrik grudgingly suffered his presence on each outing to the rock-strewn plain. Like his reputed ancestors, the man could trailblaze. It was in his blood.
On the brief journey out, Keiko started no conversations with either Andrik or the pilot. Through the parting curtains of mist she studied the landscape, amazed that it should so vividly evoke a battlefield or a meteor-pitted lunar sea. The Kyber palaces—ruins to her inexperienced eye—spread across the entire continent, forming a plurality of septa-communes or perhaps even a single monstrously diffuse metropolis. No one yet knew what sort of social structure the alien population shared, if, indeed, it was not a mere hodgepodge of seven-unit duchies. No one yet knew anything very telling about the Kybers, and Sixkiller apparently knew all he wanted to know. …
“Outside,” he had said, “I keep my mouth shut, and I do my job.” That, Keiko reflected, seemed to be literally true. Piloting, he was as mute as a stone.
Andrik, perhaps to break the embarrassing silence, said, “The Kyber palaces always remind me of a part of Pompeii redesigned by a psychologist of distorted rooms—Ames, say, or the artist Escher. It would be nice if we could put down right in the middle of a labyrinth’s central court, but we’d probably crumple one or more of our hosts.”
Lowering the floater’s landing legs, Sixkiller dropped them toward a ridge overlooking one of the alien dwellings. Ice glittered in the rocks. Huge frost mandalas shone forth from the eroded plateaus between the craters, and inside the crater toward which they were falling Keiko saw the canted maze-walls of the approach corridor spiralling inward to the palace atrium. Why no roof? The absence of a roof seemed to make a mockery of the walls meandering about the trapezoidal court at the crater’s centre—a misty open space very like an Ames distortion chamber, Keiko thought, although considerably larger. But because of the floater’s angle of descent and the fog clinging to the walls of the labyrinth, it was impossible to see any of the aliens who supposedly lay comatose at its heart. Then the floater swept across the palace and settled into the rocks on spidery legs. They were down.
Balanced on the ridge overlooking the dwelling, bundled in their parkas and boots, the three of them surveyed the Kyber “ruins”.
“This is where you found my student?” Keiko asked.
Andrik nodded, and Sixkiller, with a kind of deadly insouciance, unholstered the laser on his hip and fired it at a nearby outcropping of violet quartz. The “quartz” burst open, releasing several puffs of steam and revealing a fleshy core of seed pods or floral placentae. These immediately withered. The smell issuing from the outcropping was, yes, distinctly vinegary. One of the creatures that Naomi called snailies—a vermilion-and-cream shell with a foot like a velvet grey slipper—rolled away from the lithoid plant, and Sixkiller put it in his sights, too.
“Leave it alone,” Andrik warned him.
Sixkiller put the laser away, and the snailie rolled another several metres through the icy groundcover of rocks and rock-like vegetation before slipping over the edge.
Keiko turned to Andrik. “How do we get down there? And once down, how do we get inside?”
“Leave that to Sixkiller. There are a number of alternative entrances around the crater. Once you’ve entered, though, it’s very easy to get lost and start inadvertently backtracking. One day, at another Kyber dwelling, we never did make it to the central chamber.”
“Milius was your pilot that day,” Sixkiller said. “Not me.”
“I know, I know. Show Kei your thread of Ariadne, Sixkiller, the trailblazer’s infallible aid.”
Pokerfaced inside his bulky hood, the pilot held up a phosphor-pen.
“He marks the walls with that. No harmful effects on the Kyber labyrinth, either. The glow fades in two days’ time. Captain Hsi and the Luna Port authorities don’t want us defacing ancient monuments.”
Keiko smiled. How could you deface ruins? A historic building was simply an idea. The Japanese tore down the great shrine at Ise every ten years and built another one, which the people then regarded as of equal historic worth as the preceding structure.
“Let’s get down there,” Sixkiller said impatiently.
He led them along the edge of the plateau, past ice-riven boulders and over carpets of pebblelike succulents that hissed when they stepped on them. As they scrambled down the slope to the outer wall in the crater, Dextro disappeared in the mist. To compensate, Sixkiller began marking the unmortared wall with the phosphor-pen: streaks of fuzzy, wavering blue in the gloom. Following him and peering ahead for some sign of an opening inward, Keiko shuddered. How could a being with the demonstrable intelligence of her former student hail from such a place? It was cold, colder than on the ridge, and more humid to boot. That she could no longer see their floater was scarcely reassuring, and the sound of crackling laceworks of ice in the sluggish mist continually startled her, too.
“Here,” Sixkiller said.
The rubble under Keiko’s feet gave way to a floor resembling great shattered flagstones. Gestured forward by the pilot, she and Andrik squeezed through an arch into the outermost spiral of the approach corridor. Fog coiled off the floor, as if somewhere under the surface a Kyber were operating a mist-generator and venting the stuff upward through the cracks in the flagstones. Only Sixkiller’s phosphor marks provided any clue to their relative whereabouts inside the maze.
“Now you know how a frog must feel,” Andrik murmured.
“A frog?” asked Keiko.
“All it can perceive is dark edges, or sustained contrasts, or maybe net darkening. That’s it.”
Sixkiller halted and turned back on them. “And you suppose the Kybers as far above us in their perceptiveness as we are above frogs—is that it, Dr Norn?”
“That’s entirely possible, Sixkiller,” Andrik replied fiercely. “But we’re never going to know if you don’t get us where we’re supposed to go.”
The pilot hesitated. Keiko feared that he was on the verge of mutiny. What would they do if he left them to their own devices and returned to the Platform without them, swearing that she and Andrik had fallen victim to the terrain or to the unexpected rapacity of the resurrected Kybers? He might well be believed. …
Dextro, a muted fireball, reappeared overhead. As soon as the mist had swaddled it again, Sixkiller scowled contemptuously and turned back to his task. In a moment he was several metres ahead of them, trailing phosphor marks by way of recrimination a
nd duty.
“Bastard,” grumbled Andrik.
After another fifteen minutes in the corridor, sometimes moving inward through irregularly spaced arches, Sixkiller at last led them into the atrium. An open space, thought Keiko, grateful to have been delivered from the claustrophobic possibilities of the maze. An open space.
The mist at her back parted, whipped upward in a gust of wind, and waved dissolving grey tendrils at the sky. There was Dextro again. It loomed in the ill-woven fog like a Chinese lantern, fat and corrugated and orange.
What Keiko saw in the chamber struck her as forcibly as if she had entered a charnelhouse.
Six Kybers occupied the trapezoidal atrium, two lying together on a bierlike stone slab, one frozen in a ridiculous squatting posture, two elevated on their extensible legs to a stationary height of nearly three metres, and a final one sitting in a corner on a nonexistent chair. Mortuary statues? Skeletons? Metallic mummies? The sight was chilling. Nothing moved but a few tatters of mist. The aura of death so permeated the open chamber that Keiko’s first inclination was to flee back the way she had come.
But she held her ground and asked the obvious question: “Where’s the seventh Kyber, Andrik?”
“Are there only six?” He made a quick count. “One of them’s out and about, sure enough. Your student, I think.”
“How do you know which is which?”
“I don’t,” Andrik confessed. “I can’t tell the Kybers apart any better than I can Orientals.”
“You sometimes confuse me with Captain Hsi, then?”
Andrik, who had been smiling, enjoying the banter, suddenly caught himself up and looked at the floater pilot. “No,” he said, “but Sixkiller occasionally does.”
Sixkiller, his doe’s eyes utterly tranquil, drew his hand laser and pointed it at one of the Kybers. “Only six,” he said. “Today, Dr Norn, I could prove the appropriateness of my name.”
“Farrell!” Keiko exclaimed, reaching toward him.
